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Windows Forensics-Where to look-What to use

Windows Forensics-Where to look-What to use

I had originally intended to put together a tutorial outlining a toolkit for incident response teams. I decided instead it would probably be more useful to put together a basic lesson geared towards the enthusiast, and the system administrators that normally don't do computer forensics. Most of the tools I have listed have been mentioned here in one thread or another. Oh, I'm not including the links to any tools, they are easy enough to find.

I realize also that there have been 2 previous tutorials relating to forensics, and this one is intended to compliment them. "Windows forensics", by Grinler, looks at it from a networking angle. "Building your Forensic Toolkit", by magnoon, lists many useful tools. I recommend you read both of them.

Unless you are conducting a casual inquiry, you should make a 'ghosted' copy from whatever media you are trying to recover data. There are many sites that detail making a forensically sterile copy.

One of the first tools you should have is a clean boot disk, unless you're not really trying to build a legal case against anyone. Why? I'm glad you asked. On my computer, when you type in "cmd" from the run command, it starts a little program that overwrites every bit of data on my hard drive.(Ok, not really, but you get the point.)

First and foremost, password protection. As users are becoming more sophisticated, some are actually turning to password protection. I'm sure many of you are already aware of tools available for password cracking, I just am listing my personal favorites:

TOOL LISTING:

Cain & Abel- Very powerful, tons of features. It has recently been iproved to include network capibilities.
NTpassreset- Has the ability to reset admin password from a bootdisk.

LOGICAL FILE SYSTEM
A cursory search with Explorer for anything interesting. (i.e stuff_to_steal.txt)

SYSTEM LOGS-

In Windows XP, there are system logs, application logs, and security logs. System logs record system processes and device driver activities. Application logs record activity by, oddly enough, applications. Security logs detail changes in user privelage, changes in policy, system users, and file and directory access. The downside to the logs is that they are not enabled by default. Also, the IP addresses of remote systems are not recorded.

Logfiles are usually stored in the %system%\sys32\config, but may be in a different location.

A search of .log files on my xp box turned up some sixty or so files. Two of them were somewhat interesting.
-ebd.log= Transaction log that monitors any changes to the active directory
-userenv.log= Tracks settings and changes applied using the group policy

TOOL LISTING:

psloglist: a tool from sysinternals to parse the logs, included in the pstoolsuite. This tool is very useful when the event log is password protected, or you are on a remote computer.
mslogparser: command line app that parses all logs into an easy to read format (kind of hard to find )

REGISTRY FILES-

The registry is, in essence, a huge log file. Installed software, MRU files, security configuration, and hardware are among the keys that can be found here. Keyword searches are generally the most useful way to search. Don't forget to snoop around for backups of the registry also.

One of the downsides to the registry is the lack of time/date stamps, making it difficult to narrow your search (at least I couldn't find any)

Read a tutorial or two so at least you have a basic understanding of the registry structure.

TOOL LISTING:

regedit: all you really need, but limited.
regmon: a very good registry viewer that does include some date information, and includes some parsing abilities. Generally most useful for "live" analysis.
regdump:

MASTER FILE TABLE

A close cousin to the registry is the Master File Table (MFT). In basic terms, it is an index to every file and folder on your hard drive. A copy of the Master Boot Record is kept here also.

I haven't been able to dig up too much information on forensics tools and techniques related to this area other than what I could find with Google. They are essential for proper operation of you system, and are essential for system restore capabilities. They are seen as $mft, and $mftmirror.

TOOL LISTING:

Winhex: not free, but fully functional. Allows you to view specific clusters on the hard drive. I rate this among the must have of tools.

BROWSER HISTORIES-

Emails, sites visited, they are all here somewhere, even if you have history disabled, and caching disabled. Check the registry, amongst other places. As was pointed out in a thread awhile back, your browser leaves crumbs everywhere. (my apologies to whoever authored that...I couldn't find it)

Netscape keeps its email files in Program Files\netscape\users\&lt;account&gt;mail. It is stored as an .snm file, and a text file. Very useful from a forensics standpoint.

Outlook records can generally be found in Documents and Settings\&lt;user&gt;\local settings|application data\microsoft outlook, and they are stored as a .pst file. Outlook has some configuration capabilities, so you may have to hunt for them.

TOOL LISTING:

Exposed: Another tool on the must have list, but be careful with it!!
Pasco: A nice tool from foundstone that reveals browser activity.

"So", you might ask,"what if my suspect used one of those nifty browser/window washer applications I hear so much about?" Never fear, I will address that in Data Recovery

TEMP FILES-

Many programs leave remnants in .tmp files from installation and creation. In some cases, Outlook and Netscape leave attachments as .tmp files. Any hex editing program can be used.

RECYCLE BIN-

The recycle bin is another place one should examine for evidence if installations, documents, etc. And most of us are aware that the recycle bin is not actually emptied, but rather the files are marked as available space. So what if the recycle bin is empty? See Data Recovery.

DATA RECOVERY

So, what do you do when the recycle bin is empty, and your fishing around in the browser histories turn up nothing? Try the following tools.

A couple things to note. As I mentioned in an earlier thread, "washer" type software, in general, does not overwrite any of the data...it is still recoverable with one of the above programs.

I also had the opportunity to test some file "wiping" software...they didn't work either. I'm not sure if that is NTFS related, or if the deleted files were still somehow protected in the recycle bin.(alternatively, I am a complete moron that didn't use them correctly) I hope to have some time to investigate that further.

OTHER THINGS OF INTEREST (OR, LATE BREAKING NEWS AND LAST MINUTE ADDITIONS)

If all your searching turns up nothing, there are still a couple things you can try. One is by generating MD5 hashes of all files, and comparing them against various databases...again, turn to Google. (http://www.knowngoods.org/)

Alternate data stream detection, from a forensics standpoint, is a relatively new field, and there are not very many tools available. Basically, it is hiding data within other data. A couple tools I found:

Scanads: ScanADS Scans Alternate Data Streams (ADS) in a local/remote system.
lads: Shows the ADS of encrypted files, even when these files were encrypted with another copy of Windows 2000. From HeySoft.de.

Steganography- although the concept has been around longer than many of us have been alive (and maybe longer), the field is also relatively new to forensics.

Stegdetect: Capable of detecting several different steganographic methods to embed hidden information in JPEG images.

Root kit detection-although a forensics issue, it is more of a networking issue. I wasn't able to find any freeware tools other than demos, although I was able to find alot of info for Linux.

***please excuse some of my over simplistic explanations, and bad jokes. Hopefull once I get a stable version of linux running (my project for the next few days) I'll be able to put one together for linux. Please also excuse my typos, bad grammar, etc.

Don't forget, when Windows boots up it modifies approx. 500 different files. It changes there date/time stamp. So if you boot up the system to inspect it, you are going to be changing the access times on those files. Also don't just browser history, but also file search history. Things like auto-complete can be viewed in the registry. In doing an investigation, users will try to mask what they have been doing. Password cracking PWL's or the SAM can be important for finding passwords that can be used on encrypted or steg'd files. You mentioned CAIN which is also good for retrieving cached passwords. One more thing, with EFS it is important to know how to recover encryption keys, by default in windows stand-alone the administrator account is the recovery agent. The programs you mentioned will allow you to change the administrator account password and recover keys. I know it is hard to write an all inclusive tutorial on such a big subject, but it was informative.

Very interesting, particularly if read in conjunction with your last post. I have always been interested in two items that you have yet to mention (your next project ?)

That is:

1. Information stored in the swap/page file

2. Information stored in that part of the hard drive used by defragmentation tools to re-assemble stuff.

Keep 'em comin

Cheers

If you cannot do someone any good: don't do them any harm....
As long as you did this to one of these, the least of my little ones............you did it unto Me.
What profiteth a man if he gains the entire World at the expense of his immortal soul?

Related to forensics:
Here is a link to a program for securely deleting files under windows. It writes random data over the file a few times before deleting it. I have used it and I assume it works......never tried to retreive the test file. http://sourceforge.net/projects/eraser/

I just thought I'd follow up on a couple of the above points, even though the thread is very old.

First, as regards wiping software: I haven't tested a whole lot of the wiping software out there. However, I did have a chance to test Eraser 5.7, the current version of the file Datsun mentioned above (freeware, available from http://www.heidi.ie/eraser/). I created a test text file and using both the free "Disk Investigator" program and Winhex, navigated to the location on my hard disk where the file was kept. I verified the file contents using the view of the raw disk data. I then did a regular delete of the file, which I then verified left the data on the disk intact.

I followed this test with creating another text file, and once again navigated to the data on the disk. This time, I wiped the file using Eraser. A refresh confirmed that the data on the disk was wiped clean (all the way to the end of the last cluster). In other words, it worked as advertised; there was nothing left to recover.

As regards spider, above: tests of my own have led me to the conclusion that if one simply starts Windows and clears Internet cache files and history, the data remains intact in Index.dat files. However, if you run Internet Explorer first, then close the program and clear the cache/history without closing Windows first, the Index.dat files are cleared.

Regardless, I've written a short logoff script which secure deletes the Index.dat files as well as any Internet Explorer cache/history/cookie files. The script uses Eraser, the program mentioned above.